• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.83-94
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• 2011

Extra heavy oil reservoirs are distributed over the world but most of them is deposited in the northern part of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, in the area of 5,500 $km^2$, This region, which has been commonly called "the Orinoco Oil Belt", contains estimated 1.3 trillion barrels of original oil-in-place and 250 billion barrels of established reserves. The Venezuela extra heavy oil has an API gravity of less than 10 degree and in situ viscosity of 5,000 cP at reservoir condition. Although the presence of extra heavy oil in the Orinoco Oil Belt has been initially reported in the 1930's, the commercial development using in situ cold production started in the 1990's. The Orinoco heavy oil deposits are clustered into 4 development areas, Boyaco, Junin, Ayachoco, and Carabobo respectively, and they are subdivided into totally 31 production blocks. Nowadays, PDVSA (Petr$\'{o}$leos de Venzuela, S.A.) makes a development of each production block with the international oil companies from more than 20 countries forming a international joint-venture company. The Eastern Venezuela Basin, the Orinoco Oil Belt is included in, is one of the major oil-bearing sedimentary basins in Venezuela and is first formed as a passive margin basin by the Jurassic tectonic plate motion. The major source rock of heavy oil is the late Cretaceous calcareous shale in the central Eastern Venezuela Basin. Hydrocarbon materials migrated an average of 150 km up dip to the southern margin of the basin. During the migration, lighter fractions in the hydrocarbon were removed by biodegradation and the oil changed into heavy and/or extra heavy oil. Miocene Oficina Formation, the main extra heavy oil reservoir, is the unconsolidated sand and shale alternation formed in fluvial-estuarine environment and also has irregularly a large number of the Cenozoic faults induced by basin subsidence and tectonics. Because Oficina Formation has not only complex lithology distribution but also irregular geology structure, geological evolution and characteristics of the reservoirs have to be determined for economical production well design and effective oil recovery. This study introduces geological formation and evolution of the Venezuela extra heavy oil reservoirs and suggest their significant geological characteristics which are (1) thickness and geometry of reservoir pay sands, (2) continuity and thickness of mud beds, (3) geometry of faults, (4) depth and geothermal character of reservoir, (5) in-situ stress field of reservoir, and (6) chemical composition of extra heavy oil. Newly developed exploration techniques, such as 3-D seismic survey and LWD (logging while drilling), can be expected as powerful methods to recognize the geological reservoir characteristics in the Orinoco Oil Belt.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.19-31
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• 2024

Ports are vital social infrastructures that significantly influence both people's lives and a country's economy. In South Korea, the aging of port infrastructure combined with the increased frequency of various natural disasters underscores the necessity of displacement monitoring for safety management of the port. In this study, the time-series displacements of Yeongilman Port and surrounding areas in Pohang, South Korea, were measured by applying Permanent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PSInSAR) to Sentinel-1 SAR images collected from the satellite's ascending (February 2017-July 2023) and descending (February 2017-December 2021) nodes, and the displacement associated with the 2017 Pohang earthquake in the port was analyzed. The southern (except the southernmost) and central parts of Yeongilman Port showed large displacements attributed to construction activities for about 10 months at the beginning of the observation period, and the coseismic displacement caused by the Pohang earthquake was up to 1.6 cm of the westward horizontal motion and 0.5 cm of subsidence. However, little coseismic displacement was observed in the southernmost part of the port, where reclamation was completed last, and in the northern part of the oldest port. This represents that the weaker the consolidation of the reclaimed soil in the port, the more vulnerable it is to earthquakes, and that if the soil is very weakly consolidated due to ongoing reclamation, it would not be significantly affected by earthquakes. Summer subsidence and winter uplift of about 1 cm have been repeatedly observed every year in the entire area of Yeongilman Port, which is attributed to volume changes in the reclaimed soil due to temperature changes. The ground of the 1st and 2nd General Industrial Complexes adjacent to Yeongilman Port subsided during the observation period, and the rate of subsidence was faster in the 1st Industrial Complex. The 1st Industrial Complex was observed to have a westward horizontal displacement of 3 mm and a subsidence of 6 mm as the coseismic displacement of the Pohang earthquake, while the 2nd Industrial Complex was analyzed to have been little affected by the earthquake. The results of this study allowed us to identify the time-series displacement characteristics of Yeongilman Port and understand the impact of earthquakes on the stability of a port built by coastal reclamation.